Brain News and Research

The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ. Enclosed in the cranium, it has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times as large as the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size.

Houston Methodist cancer researchers are now closer to creating a blood test that can identify breast cancer patients who are at increased risk for developing brain metastasis, and also monitor disease progression and response to therapy in real time.

Sunbathers may want to avoid midnight snacks before catching some rays. A study in mice from the O'Donnell Brain Institute and UC Irvine shows that eating at abnormal times disrupts the biological clock of the skin, including the daytime potency of an enzyme that protects against the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation.

A popular theory in recent neuroscience proposes that slow development of the prefrontal cortex - and its weak connectivity with brain reward regions - explains teenagers' seemingly impulsive and risky behavior.

Scientists are increasingly appreciating estrogen's role in brain health. Now for the first time, production of estrogen in the brain has been directly linked to the presence of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).

For people with Parkinson's disease, seeing a neurologist by video conference from their homes may be as effective as their usual in-person care with their local physician, according to a new study published in the August 16, 2017, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Scientists have used magnetism to activate tiny groups of cells in the brain, inducing bodily movements that include running, rotating and losing control of the extremities -- an achievement that could lead to advances in studying and treating neurological disease.

A team of scientists led by chemists Stephen Martin and James Sahn at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered what they say is a powerful pain reliever that acts on a previously unknown pain pathway.

Research led by the head of the Barrow Neurological Institute and published in the July 20, 2017 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reveals that subarachnoid hemorrhages, which are caused by ruptured brain aneurysms, account for 5-10 percent of all strokes and are best managed by experienced and dedicated experts at high-volume centers with neurosurgeons, endovascular surgeons and stroke neurologists.

Navigation in mammals including humans and rodents depends on specialized neural networks that encode the animal's location and trajectory in the environment, serving essentially as a GPS, findings that led to the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

An abundance of an amino acid called methionine, which is common in meat, cheese and beans, may provide new clues to the fetal brain development that can manifest in schizophrenia, University of California, Irvine pharmacology researchers report in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

A team led by scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Mayo Clinic has identified a basic biological mechanism that kills neurons in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and in a related genetic disorder, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), found in some ALS patients.

By the time you start losing your memory, it`s almost too late. That`s because the damage to your brain associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may already have been going on for as long as twenty years.

Researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that compounds produced by the creosote bush, a desert plant common to the Southwestern United States, exhibit potent anti-parasitic activity against the protozoa responsible for giardia infections and an amoeba that causes an often-lethal form of encephalitis.

It is important to keep in mind that nontuberculous mycobacteria are environmental, and so unlike mycobacterial tuberculosis, generally this is not a person to person transmitted disease. The organisms are found universally in water and soil and so most people are exposed on a daily basis.

Aging is the continuing process of such stress exposures, and with advancing age (normal aging), we must carry lots of senescent cells within our bodies. Senescent cells also often provide some ‘bad influences’ to surrounding healthy cells; such as chronic inflammation and tumorigenesis

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